by Grace Draven
The woman spoke, her voice like a reed flute, thin, piping, breathlessly sweet. She looked up at the buzzard hulking overhead, then she looked down at the knife in Napier’s hand. “He a carrion bird. He follers death. Like you.” She tilted her head a little, considering him, birdlike herself, out of the side of her eye. “Or maybe you comes afore him…maybe you brings the death, mister.” Her arms lifted until she could rest her hands on the porch railing. Her breasts lifted a little, too, capped with rose-taupe nipples and set off by shadow and sunlight.
“I…uh…” Napier looked down at the knife and slowly slid it into its sheath at his waist. The DLR was still screaming, but so were the expectations of polite society. What did one say when one came across a naked woman in a swamp? It wasn’t like she was concealing a gun. “Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.”
The sun lit her wild tangle of hair like a torch, giving her a strangely greenish aureole. The buzzard hissed again. Gooseflesh prickled down his arms despite the August swelter.
“I’ll…uh, go. I didn’t mean to trespass.” Napier glanced over his shoulder, trying to keep her in view while he searched for the trail.
“No need for regrets, mister. We’s all friends here, as may be. What they call you?”
Jesus, couldn’t she put on some clothes? Didn’t the mosquitoes eat her alive? Yet he didn’t see a single welt or scratch on her, not her breasts or arms or face or legs, or the curve where her ribs gave way to her waist and hips. He split his attention between the woman and the ground. The trail should have spilled its white sand out the end like silt from a river, but there was nothing except the smooth, unbranching gray-green trunks of gum trees and the network of roots.
“Uh…Napier. Charles Napier. Pleased to…pleased to meet you.”
“I guess,” she said, and pulled herself up with her hands. She wasn’t tall, but her legs were good, and Napier could see a diamond of sunlight shining through the place where her thighs met her hips, and the floss of hair that blurred it. “You can call me Jenny.”
“How do you do, Jenny. If you’ll point me to the trail, I’ll head back to my canoe and be on my way—”
“You look mighty sweaty an’ hot, Charles Napier. Why don’t you come swimmin’ with me?” She turned to her right, walked to the end of the porch, swung under the silvery cypress wood railing like a kid on a playground, and dropped without a splash into the brilliant blue water of the spring below.
“Jesus,” Napier said again, feeling like his breath was trapped in his throat.
In the golden light of early evening, the spring did look gorgeous. And he was hot and sweaty, as Jenny had said. Jenny. Jenny who? What the hell was she doing out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere? She didn’t talk like a crazy person, not exactly, though she didn’t talk like a reasonable one, either. He put down his go-bag and the sack with his bedding, kept an eye on the buzzard, and walked slowly to the edge of the spring. She was swimming underwater, her scissoring legs wavy in the refracted light, looking as if they were merging, becoming a fishtail, gilded with slippery scales. The spring was perhaps an acre in size, aqua green at its edges, surrounded by magnificent moss-hung oaks and magnolias, and deep sapphire blue where the spring’s massive limestone throat went down into the earth. It drained into the swamp beyond and was probably the source of the clearer water where he’d pulled his canoe onto the bank.
Where the monster catfish chased you—right, Chuck?
This spring wasn’t on any state topo map he’d ever seen, he’d have bet his job on that. A place this beautiful would never have been left untouched. Even springs on private land saw their share of local trespassers, and this spring would be legendary.
It simply…didn’t look right. He looked over his shoulder at the sweetgum trees. They ran as far as he could see in either direction, bordering the spring starting just past the little shack on stilts, and disappeared into the hamaca’s trees in the other direction.
There was no break in their regular, tight planting. He still could not see where he’d emerged from that pearl-white path through the blueberry shrubs.
That river…it’s haunted. So are those sweetgum trees. Ghost trees, look at them. They’re keeping you here. They’ve closed off the trail. They let you come through, but now you’ll stay here whether you want to or not.
“Bullshit,” Napier said aloud. The buzzard cocked its head at him and let out another terrifying rasp of air. Napier gave it an ugly look, which it returned with interest. He’d never heard of anyone with a tame buzzard before, but then again he didn’t often meet naked women in swamps whose conversational gambits began with comments about death and carrion and proceeded to invitations for skinny-dipping.
The shack behind the bird looked like an ordinary fish camp made of old cypress boards and shingles, silver with age, greenish with moss where the edges curled up or split. Cypress wood lasted almost forever, resistant to wet, insects and rot. The place was maybe twelve feet on a side, one simple four-paned window in each of the three sides he could see. The back looked out over the spring beneath it. Stairs from the porch descended in a long, shallow flight to the earth of the hamaca.
Set like jewels in the corner of each window were triangular, pointed shells of some sort. Their tips faced inward to the center of the window. On each riser of the stairs sat a deer skull on the right, and an alligator skull on the left. It was a macabre arrangement that made Napier shake his head and wonder when the banjo music from Deliverance would begin to play, or whether his thirsty afternoon of chasing phantom birds had summoned a sunstroke nightmare.
Can’t stay here. This place is some kinda crazy. I gotta—and at that moment, Jenny surfaced like a mermaid, her blonde hair a mist fanning out around her shoulders, the tangles less evident now. She was smiling as she blinked water out of her eyes, and in each hand she held a fat, succulent, white freshwater crab, claws flailing and furious.
“You look mighty hungry, too,” she said, and walked out of the water like Venus from the foam. Her hair, wet and slicked down, looked greenish in the evening light. Napier wondered if she swam in chlorinated pools, or if—no, it couldn’t be—her blonde hair stayed so wet that it actually hosted a colony of algae.
“I really should go,” Napier said. “I don’t want to bother you. If you’d just show me the trail, I’ll leave you alone.”
“Hold these,” Jenny said, and thrust the crabs at him. “They’s a basket in the house. You get it an’ put ‘em in. I’ll get more supper for us. I can eat least three a them things. You?”
“I can’t stay,” he said helplessly, trying to keep the crabs’ claws from catching the cuffs of his shirt or pinching his hands. “I’ve got to go.”
“Naw,” Jenny said, moving close, inside the reach of his arms, which were held out to keep the crabs away. The DLR awakened. He’d have to chuck away a crab to grab his knife if she intended mischief, but she was clearly unarmed and a small woman into the bargain. “You ain’t got to.” She rose on tiptoe, pressed a fleeting, springwater-cool kiss upon his startled mouth, and returned to the spring in a long shallow dive.
Napier’s dick twitched in response, and he swore a string of words as blue as the spring’s throat. In the spring, Jenny surfaced with a flick of her wet hair. “What you waitin’ on?” she said, gesturing to the shack. “Door ain’t locked or nothin’.” She dived again. Napier ignored the bone-stupid response of his body and headed for the stairs, keeping a wary eye on the buzzard, which edged away from him along the railing.
He nudged the warped door open with his boot toe, still holding a crab in each hand, and peered inside the shack. As he’d thought, there was a fourth window on the back wall, overlooking the spring. More cypress boards formed the floor, with gaps between boards large enough to lose a pencil into the water below. Empty knotholes looked like hooded eyes in the late light. As far as furniture, there was a perilously balanced cabinet arranged from salvaged plastic coolers stacked on their sides, a tabl
e made from a gigantic wooden spool scavenged from a utility company cable truck, and in the corner furthest from the door, what could only have been Jenny’s bed. It looked like a child had made it from a couple of dirty sheets and dozens of bits of knotted strings every inch or so on their edges to hold the contents inside. The gray curls of Spanish moss poked out from between the knots, along with the white fluff of willow catkins and milkweed pods. It was more of a nest than a bed, but clearly it was where she rested. He could see the dent in the bed’s middle.
There was no stove or other heat source, no sink or basin, certainly no toilet. No chairs, no lanterns. Not that he’d expected suburban comfort way the hell out here, but this seemed to go beyond poverty into some strange minimalist way of life he’d never encountered in all the time he’d tramped the Panhandle’s backwoods.
The crabs were still flailing in his hands, nipping his wrists or clacking against his wristwatch. Napier saw the basket she meant, a bucket-like construction of tightly woven palmetto leaves. It stood on the spool table, next to a pile of empty green hickory nut hulls. Napier eased his weight onto the floor of the shack. No ominous creak, no prod from the DLR. Two strides took him to the bucket, where he rid himself of the squirming, pinching crabs. Inside, they immediately sought to climb out, one atop the other, falling, trying again. Their clattering was strange and disquieting, like a basket full of bare, rattling bones.
One step more took him to the makeshift cupboard. He lifted one of the cooler lids on its hinge. Inside he found a few stained plastic containers that looked as though Jenny had found them floating in the swamp and brought them home for her dinner service. They were empty, which inexplicably relieved Napier. He opened a second cooler and obeyed the DLR instantly when a flood of eldritch green light came from the stale-smelling plastic depths. He threw himself on his belly and scrabbled for the door. He heard the soft thwack of the cooler lid dropping back into place, but did not look that way. Instead, his eyes followed the green light, at first a coherent stream, then shredding apart like sparks rising from a fire. Some of the sparks appeared self-directed, not rising, not falling, but moving through the air on an erratic path. A few winked out, then blinked back to life, and he realized, with stunned confusion, what he was looking at.
Fireflies.
Hundreds and hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. They were dispersing all through the cabin, the dark little insects landing on walls, table, floor. One or two drifted out the knotholes and gaps in the floor.
“Christ,” he breathed. His hammering heart slowed a little, but the DLR kept prodding. Who in their right mind captured that many fireflies? And how? Did Jenny have some way of attracting them?
“Charles Napier!” The breathless, sweet voice called from outside. “Where you at with that basket? An’ you leave my pets alone.”
Napier rose slowly. He gathered up the palmetto basket, then went through the door. On the railing, the turkey buzzard stared, but did not hiss. “What are you looking at?” he asked the bird’s ugly, naked head.
To Napier’s right was the front window. His peripheral vision noted a cluster of blinking fireflies creeping over the single pane of glass as if seeking the exit. Their greenish light didn’t travel far, but the window glass conducted it weirdly to the corners of the pane, where it gleamed beneath the decorative shells. Skulls? Teeth? Something else uncanny to trigger his DLR? He leaned closer, ignoring the rustle of buzzard feathers to his left.
The decorations weren’t shells at all.
They had to be, could only be, the chisel beaks of ivory-billed woodpeckers. His fingers twitched toward one, needing to examine it more closely and in better light, but he was all but certain. And she—Jenny—had at least sixteen of them, in all the corners of the four windows. His heart pounded. Were they found objects, or did the strange naked woman somehow trap the birds and kill them for their beaks? What of the animal skulls on the porch steps? Kills? She’ll mount your skull on a cypress knee, Chuck, if you don’t get your ass out of here…
“Charles Napier!” Jenny exclaimed, and he spun from the window. The buzzard hissed again, affrighted, dropping from the railing, black wings opening to catch the air and glide to earth not far from where Jenny stood beside the spring. Her hair streamed water down her naked body, gilded and rosy in the colors of the sunset. She held a blackened stick in one hand and used it to keep four more crabs from scuttling over the spiky, short-cropped love grass serving as the bank’s lawn into the spring.
“Are those beaks from ivory-billed woodpeckers?” Napier questioned, as he came swiftly down the steps, freakish fireflies forgotten.
Jenny looked up at him slowly, her stick still prodding at the crabs.
“The beaks, the decorations in your windows.”
“I know what you’re talkin’ about.” She reached for the basket as he drew near. “I like ‘em, they’s pretty. And they let ‘em know it’s safe here.”
“Let…them know? Who?”
Jenny bent, pretty breasts swaying with her movement, legs straight, showing a flexibility that brought to mind the easy grace of acrobats and contortionists. The crabs went into the basket two at a time and the climbing frenzy began anew. Jenny looked up at him, and in the weird sunset light Napier would have sworn he saw a firefly-green glow in her eyes. “The Lord God Birds, who else?” She balanced the basket on one hip and pushed her wet hair back. “Let’s eat, I’m starvin’.”
“Tell me about the Lord God Birds.” Napier sat on the sandy bank with his cargo pants rolled up to mid-calf, his bare feet soaking in the cool water of the spring. Jenny sat next to him, still naked, her legs knee-deep. She was methodically gnawing her way through the basket of crabs—two down already—snapping their flailing legs off one by one, biting at the chitinous shells to get to the raw flesh within. Napier’s stomach had churned when she took that first bite. She accepted his polite refusal with a shrug, though she looked at him in derision when he stripped the plastic off a stick of beef jerky from his go-bag.
All around them, birds were settling in the trees above the spring—egrets and herons in the taller, barer branches of oaks, towhees and brown thrashers seeking a last snack in the brown leaves beneath the underbrush. Gulls flew overhead in a straggling string, heading south toward the Gulf of Mexico. The buzzard flapped back to the porch railing.
“See ‘em yourself in a little while,” Jenny said. “They like that snag yonder for roostin’.” She pointed with the big claw of her current victim. The dead pine was across the spring, its top silhouetted against the last fiery light of the sunset. Napier leaned back and pulled his go-bag toward him, reaching inside for his binocs and the digital camera. There wasn’t enough light for either device, but he needed them to hand. The old fart’s sheathed knife slid along his hand as the bag sagged to the side. While Napier was digging, he pulled out an apple and set it between the two of them. Jenny finished the third crab, tossed the shell aside, and leaned forward to wash her fingers, then she grabbed the apple and took huge bites of it. Napier felt the corner of his mouth crook upward and fished out a second apple for himself.
Black birds winged overhead, drawing Napier’s gaze, but they were crows, not the ivory-bills. They vanished into the trees to the left, caws carried on the faint breeze.
“They come every night?”
“Mostly.”
“I was following one today. At least, I think I was. The woodpeckers are the reason I came to the Choctawhatchee.”
Jenny looked at him thoughtfully, gnawing the apple core until nothing was left but pips and stem. She used her thumb to make a hole in the sand between the two of them, and buried the seeds. She captured another crab from the basket. “These crabs is sweet. Sure you don’t want you one?”
“I’m sure.” Napier shook his head. “Do you know where the woodpeckers nest? How many have you seen? How long—”
“Law, you ask a lot of questions. You cain’t just watch and wait?”
“I’m a bio
logist. Every biologist in the country wants to know the truth about these birds. If I bring back proof—”
“Bring back? You ain’t got to go, like I said.” Her lips pulled at a tube of crabmeat she had sucked from a claw. Her teeth gleamed white for a moment, then the flesh was gone and she was chewing with delight.
The DLR flickered at her words, which felt out of place in the conversation. Napier shut his mouth, looking over his shoulder to the line of sweetgums, ghostly in the evening light. He’d wait for the birds to roost, as she said, and then he’d make his way back to the canoe. He could stretch out in the bottom of the boat, he didn’t have to sling his hammock. It would be less comfortable, but he’d have something solid at his back and sides, and at the moment that seemed paramount.
Around them in the palmetto scrub, green lights came and went, came and went, drifting slowly. Fireflies. Napier wondered that there were no fireflies with orange beacons, but perhaps the population had become isolated and genetically limited here in this strange place. Next to him Jenny went on munching, until once again she pointed with a crab claw.
In the sky were several dark forms, bigger than crows, with the signature flight pattern of woodpeckers. Several frenetic flaps to drive the bird higher in the air, then a swoop downward, more flaps, another swoop. Napier got to his feet, binoculars useless in his hand, his digital camera on and filming the small blobs in the sky. He watched, heart pounding in excitement, as the birds made their final banked drops into the snag and vanished against the darkness of the trunk.
It was over, and it had been silent, no beeping calls, no hammering.
